---
title: History
linkTitle: history
aliases:
          [
            "/pt-br/history/",
            "/zh-cn/history/",
            "/ja/history/",
            "/other/history/",
          ]
---

{{< blocks/section color="selenium-green" height="min" >}}
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	<h1 class="d-1">Selenium History</h1>
</div>
{{< /blocks/section >}}

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  <div class="alert alert-green bg-transparent ps-lg-5" role="alert">
    <h2 class="alert-heading pb-3">The story starts in 2004</h2>
    <div class="w-lg-75">
      <p>
        The story starts in 2004 at ThoughtWorks in Chicago, with Jason Huggins building
        the Core mode as "JavaScriptTestRunner" for the testing of an internal Time and Expenses
        application (Python, Plone). Automatic testing of any applications is core to ThoughtWork's
        style, given the Agile leanings of this consultancy. He has help from Paul Gross and Jie
        Tina Wang. For them, this was a day job.
      </p>
      <p>
        Jason started demoing the test tool to various colleagues. Many were excited about its
        immediate and intuitive visual feedback, as well as its potential to grow as a reusable
        testing framework for other web applications.
      </p>
      <p>
        Soon after in 2004 fellow ThoughtWorker Paul Hammant saw the demo, and started discussions
        about the open sourcing of Selenium, as well as defining a 'driven' mode of Selenium where
        you'd get to use Selenium over the wire from a language of your choice, that would get
        around the 'same origin policy'. Other (then) colleagues, Aslak Hellesoy and Mike Melia,
        experimented with different ideas for the 'server' piece, including page rewriting to get
        around the same origin policy. Paul wrote the original server piece in Java, and Aslak
        and Obie Fernandez ported that the client driver to Ruby, setting the foundation for
        drivers in yet more languages.
      </p>
      <p>
        ThoughtWorkers in various offices around the world picked up Selenium for commercial projects,
        and contributed back to Selenium from the lessons learned on these projects. Mike Williams,
        Darrell Deboer, and Darren Cotterill all helped with the increasing the capabilities and the
        robustness of it.
      </p>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

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  <div class="alert alert-orange bg-transparent ps-lg-5" role="alert">
    <h2 class="alert-heading pb-3">Meanwhile, outside of ThoughtWorks...</h2>
    <div class="w-lg-75">
      <p>
        At Bea, Dan Fabulich and Nelson Sproul came to the conclusion that the driver/server
        to browser architecture was not the most useful or flexible, so forked the driver coder
        and crafted that into a standalone server that leveraged and bundled MortBay's Jetty as
        a web-proxy. When the code was merged back it became known as "Selenium Remote Control"
        and the old driven codeline and capability was retired.
      </p>
      <p>
        Pat Lightbody became involved at the same time, with a commercial idea that required him
        to quit his day job (Jive Software). The idea was "Hosted QA", and it was eventually
        moved into Gomez's service line. Pat worked with Dan and Nelson making Selenium RC
        stable for large scale deployment. Pat had privately coded a grid for Hosted QA that
        took screenshots of browsers in various states, and was looking after multiple customers
        concurrently. Jason had the same hosted QA idea a year before, but did not quit his day
        job to do it.
      </p>
      <p>
        In 2007 Dan moved to the rapidly growing Redfin, which also part-time sponsors his time
        on Selenium, and encourages a speaking agenda.
      </p>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

<div class="row p-5">
  <div class="alert alert-cyan bg-transparent ps-lg-5" role="alert">
    <h2 class="alert-heading pb-3">Selenium IDE: Made in Japan</h2>
    <div class="w-lg-75">
      <p>
        Shinya Kasatani in Japan became interested in Selenium, and realised that he could
        wrap the core code into an IDE module into the Firefox browser, and be able to record
        tests as well as play them back in the same plugin. This tool, turned out an eye
        opener in more ways that was originally thought as it is not bound to the same origin
        policy.
      </p>
      <p>
        Mike Williams got involved again in the Summer of 2006 where he led a team from
        ThoughWorks China, primarily Wang Peng Chao, Huang Liang and Xiong Jie but with the
        help of others. They worked on improving Selenium Core with the goal of getting it
        closer to 1.0
      </p>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

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  <div class="alert alert-blue bg-transparent ps-lg-5" role="alert">
    <h2 class="alert-heading pb-3">Google Too!</h2>
    <div class="w-lg-75">
      <p>
        Jason Huggins left Thoughtworks in 2007 and joined the (then secret) Selenium
        support team inside Google.
      </p>
      <p>
        Jennifer Bevan (and other unnamed Googlers) had coded their own grid capabilty
        for Selenium RC, and deployed it internally for the testing of multiple public
        web applications. Google hosted a GTAC conference in New York and talked about
        their use of Selenium for the first time. Jennifer soon became a committer on
        the Selenium projects.
      </p>
      <p>
        Haw-bin Chai in Chicago provided patches for XPath functionality and developed
        an extension called "UI Element" that makes the grammar of locators much simpler.
        He was invited into the Selenium development team in 2007.
      </p>
      <p>
        Simon Stewart at ThoughtWorks had been working on a different web testing tool
        called WebDriver. It did not rely on JavaScript to do the heavy lifting, but
        instead had a client for each browser that was coded from scratch. It also had a
        'higher level' API than Selenium-RC and showed lots of promise. Simon presented
        the tool at GTAC, and started work on compatibility with Selenium-RC, which gave
        rise to the obvious conclusion that the two projects should merge. Simon, at
        Google from 2007 to 2012, and now at Facebook, gets to spend some of his time
        making that a reality.
      </p>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>
